Housekeeping: (Jury) Duty Calls!

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civic duty, civil law, courts, Housekeeping, jury duty, justice, law enforcement

Just a short note to say that I’ll be taking a (sort of forced) leave of absence through Friday and possibly Monday because I’ve been selected to serve on a jury here in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

The trial will be a civil (as opposed to criminal) proceeding; I probably shouldn’t say anything specific about the substance, but it’s surely OK to note that it deals with issues I’ve written about more than once on RealityChek. In fact, to the extent I can, I’m hoping to blog about this experience – a first ever for me.

The timing’s a little unfortunate, since tomorrow the federal government will be releasing its latest report on the Federal Reserve’s favored measure of inflation, and on Friday we’ll get the latest jobs numbers. In fact, today I was going to post on the trade highlights of the new (and final, for now) data on fourth quarter, 2021 and full-year 2021 U.S. economic growth. But I unexpectedly spent 11 hours (you read that right) participating in the Zoom-ed selection process, and even more surprisingly was chosen to serve.

I aim to start catching up on these developments over the weekend, since they’ll mark important milestones in the economy’s journey through the CCP Virus pandemic and (possible) aftermath. Today’s trade results alone contained some pretty startling record and multi-decade worsts. But that goal will surely take a few days to achieve itself.

So I hope everyone has a great rest of the week and I’ll look forward to resuming normal RealityChek operations ASAP. Till then, though – (jury) duty calls!

Im-Politic: The Washington Post’s Phony Probe of Policing Abuses

Tags

crime, Im-Politic, journalism, law enforcement, Mainstream Media, police misconduct, police reform, policing, statistics, Vera Institute of Justice, Washington Post

As RealityChek readers surely know by now, reporting information out of context is one of my biggest gripes about journalism these days. (See, e.g., here.) So if there hadn’t been so much important news coming out of the Ukraine war and on so many other fronts this week, I’d have already written about an especially egregious example that appeared in the Washington Post this past Thursday.

Its big “exclusive” finding? “The Post collected data on nearly 40,000 payments [to resolve police misconduct claims] at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade, documenting more than $3.2 billion spent to settle claims.”

Sounds like a bundle right? Even a criminally large amount of money. In isolation, of course. But information never exists in isolation. And any reporter or anyone else with a working brain or a lick of integrity would have tried to answer these two questions: How does this sum compare with the nation’s total policing budget over the same period? And how does it compare with the national cost of crime?

None of this background appeared in the Post piece. But it took me a grand total of thirtyseconds of searching on-line to find answers from reliable sources.

The national law cost of policing? That’s $115 billion per year, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, whose declared mission is ending “the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.”

That is, the organization isn’t exactly an apologist for current policing performance. But it’s telling us that over ten years, the cost of settling police misconduct claims equalled 0.28 percent of America’s policing budget (of $1.15 trillion). Any decent person would like to see that number fall to zero percent, but 0.28 is pretty close. And it’s even better considering that, as at least Post reporters Keith Alexander, Steven Rich, and Hannah Thacker (along with their editors) had the honesty to observe (in the middle of this long article) that

“City officials and attorneys representing the police departments said settling claims is often more cost-efficient than fighting them in court. And settlements rarely involve an admission or finding of wrongdoing.”

The authors also state that their figures exclude payments of less than $1,000. Let’s suppose, however, that including these incidents doubles the total amount of payouts over the last decade. Then they’d represent 0.56 percent of the national policing budget. That’s still awfully close to zero for a line of work whose employees lay their lives on the line every day, and who constantly need to make split-second life-and-death decisions.

It’s of course certain that the number of police misconduct charges that produced payouts, whether they stemmed from genuine abuses or not, doesn’t include all cases of misconduct because so many undoubtedly aren’t reported. But even if all of them were, and consequently the total cost of misconduct got doubled, its share of total U.S. policing spending over the last decade would barely top one percent. So forgive me if I’m not overcome with outrage.

As for the second question, in February, 2021, a team of academics and policy analysts estimated that in the 2017, crime cost the U.S. economy $2.6 trillion. That single year number is more than 8oo times bigger than the Post‘s figure for the last ten years’ worth of costs for police misconduct payouts.

As a result, these police misconduct costs as a percentage of the costs of crime to America over a year – much less a decade – don’t even represent the proverbial “drop in the bucket.” They’re more like an aerosol particle in the bucket.

The researchers who came up with the cost-of-crime figure acknowledge that limitations on the available data for crime forced them to include modeling techniques in their calculations, and that more work (and more actual information) should be performed to produce greater accuracy. But even if the $2.6 trillion overestimates the national cost of crime by half, it would still render the police misconduct payouts total utterly trivial in comparison.

Policing abuses definitely need to be reduced dramatically. But how about setting the same goal for the kinds of rampant journalistic abuses most recently epitomized by this Washington Post investigation?

Those Stubborn Facts: Where Progressives Defunded the Police…& More

Tags

"Defund the Police", African Americans, crime, law enforcement, murder, New York City, policing, shootings, Those Stiubborn Facts

African American share of N.Y City population, 2020: c. 24%

African American share of N.Y. City murder victms, 2020:  65%

African American share of N.Y. City shooting victims, 2020:  74%

 

(Source: “These Policies Were Supposed to Help Black People. They’re Backfiring,” by Jim Quinn and Hannah E. Meyers, The New York Times, February 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/opinion/nyc-black-victims-crime.html)

Im-Politic: Fauci Doctors the Facts Again

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Anthony S. Fauci, Biden administration, Bureau of Labor Statistics, CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Chris Wallace, coronavirus, COVID 19, essential workers, Fauci, Fox News, Im-Politic, law enforcement, mortality, Officer Down Memorial Page, police, vaccine mandates, vaccines, Wuhan virus

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, had a ready answer this past Sunday when a news anchor asked him whether or not he bears any responsibility for the growing criticism he’s attracted during the CCP Virus pandemic:

“[I] have stood — always making science, data, and evidence be what we guide ourselves by. And I think people who feel differently, who have conspiracy theories, who deny reality that’s looking em straight in the eye, those are people that don’t particularly care for me.

“And that’s understandable because what I do and I try very hard is to be guided by the truth. And sometimes, the truth becomes inconvenient for some…people, so they react against me. That just is what it is. There’s not much I can do about that…”

Actually, here’s something he can do about it. He can stop presenting facts that are not only completely free-floating but so devoid of any context that they become completely misleading – as he did on the same program.

Asked by Fox News‘ Chris Wallace whether vaccine mandates should be enforced for essential workers like police – many of which oppose the requirements, Fauci declared,

“We now know the statistics, more police officers die of COVID than they do in other causes of death. So, it doesn’t make any sense to not trying to protect yourself as well as the colleagues that you work with.”

Fauci’s claim is correct strictly speaking – at least according to this organization that tracks police deaths in the line of duty. But comparing police virus deaths with other causes of police fatalities has zero to do with how especially susceptible or not officers are to Covid. In fact, the only valid way of determining the relative vulnerability of these law enforcement personnel is to compare their CCP Virus experiences – in this case, mortality – versus that of their closest population-wide peer group.

And what these data make plain as day is that police nationwide are much less likely to die of the virus than those most like them demographically.

The peer group in question is working age adults, and this source pegs their population at 170,975,648 as of last year. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that through October 13, they’d suffered 233,965 deaths. “involving” the CCP Virus (which RealityChek regulars know is a problematic concept). So that’s a mortality rate of 0.14 percent.

The number of police officers whose deaths have been attributed to having contracted the disease on duty is 479 according to the aforementioned Office Down Memorial Page. And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has pegged the nationwide number of police and sheriff’s patrol officers at 654,900. Do the math, and you get a death rate of 0.07 percent. That’s only half the level for the working age adult control group.

Surely one big reason for this disparity is that law enforcement personnel are healthier as a rule than their closest demographic peers. But far from “explaining away” Fauci’s mistake, it’s a point so obvious that he should know it. He should also realize that because, like other essential personnel, policemen and women stayed on the job during the worst of the virus, stayed on it long before vaccines were available, and worked jobs that required lots of personal contact, many surely contracted Covid – and recovered, thereby acquiring natural immunity. Despite his enthusiasm for the mandates, as even Fauci has admitted, this inconvenient (for vaccine zealots) truth of virology is tough to square with calls for mass, indiscriminate, and forced jabbing.

I’m enough of a believer in vaccines’ effectiveness and in the seriousness of the CCP Virus that I cringe every time I hear some pundit or news talker argue that members of the public health establishment like Fauci and the politicians that follow them have supported vaccine mandates and other forms of anti-virus business and behavioral curbs primarily because they’re control freaks. But every time I hear such folks so blatantly and sanctimoniously peddle this kind of misinformation, it makes me wonder.

Im-Politic: A Cop Owed an Apology from Biden

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Biden, Biden administration, civil rights, criminal justice, Democrats, George Floyd, Im-Politic, Jacob Blake, Justice Department, Kamala Harris, Kenosha riots, law enforcement, Michael Graveley, police brutality, police shootings, policing, Rusten Sheskey, systemic racism, Wisconsin

I think it’s more than fair to say that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris owe Rusten Sheskey an apology. Not that they’re the only ones (by a long shot). But I also think it’s fair to say that the President and Vice President are in a special category – even above LeBron James.

Who’s this Sheskey character, you may wonder? He’s the Kenosha, Wisconsin policeman whose allegedly unjustified and indeed racist shooting of James Blake ignited several days of rioting in that city during late August of the “George Floyd summer” of 2020.

By early January, however, it was becoming clear that these accusations – which were also swallowed whole and spread by the women’s and men’s pro basketball leagues (including Los Angeles Laker superstar James), Major League Baseball, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, and pro tennis  – were baseless.

That month, Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley, a Democrat, declared that Sheskey had committed no crime when shooting Blake. And he made it obvious why. Blake had resisted arrest when Sheskey and other offices attempted to apprehend him (on felony third-degree sexual assault and misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct charges). He admitted he was carrying a knife.

And Graveley’s official report said that tasering had failed to subdue Blake; that Blake “had the opened knife in his right hand and was attempting to escape from Officer Sheskey’s grasp and enter the driver’s side of [his] SUV”; that both Sheskey and a colleague stated that “in the moment before Officer Sheskey opened fire, Jacob Blake twisted his body, moving his right hand with the knife towards Officer Sheskey”: and that “Two citizen witnesses saw Jacob Blake’s body turn in a manner that appears consistent with what the officers described.”

Indeed, the Kenosha D.A. added, “Officer Sheskey felt he was about to be stabbed.”

Even though this decision had preceded their inaugurations by about three weeks, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris should have issued apologies right then and there. Why? Because right after the shooting, they rushed to judgment and claimed that the evidence available met the prosecution standard.

Acccording to Biden, “We should make sure when all the facts are in and then a decision be made, but based on its appearance, unless they can show something different than what everybody saw, it looks like an overuse of force.”

One of his campaign spokesmen elaborated later:

“He believes that, based on everything he has seen, charges appear warranted, but that there should be a full investigation to ensure all the facts are known first. It is essential that officers in situations like this are held accountable, under due process.”

That’s better than the first statement, which appeared to argue that the burden of proof rested with Sheskey and his lawyers. But if candidate Biden really believed that “all the facts” weren’t in, why make any judgements at all?

Moreover, Mr. Biden lumped the Blake shooting in with other instances of what he considered racist brutality by police:

“[T]his morning, the nation wakes up yet again with grief and outrage that yet another black American is a victim of excessive force,” he said. “This calls for an immediate, full and transparent investigation and the officers must be held accountable….Equal justice has not been real for Black Americans and so many others.”

Harris also referred to the need for a “thorough investigation” but then went on at length to make clear she, too, had already come to major and incriminating conclusions. Specifically,

“based on what I’ve seen, it seems that the officer should be charged. The man was going to his car. He didn’t appear to be armed. And if he was not armed, the use of force that was seven bullets coming out of a gun at close range in the back of the man, I don’t see how anybody could reason that that was justifiable.”

Added Harris, (who oddly acknowledged that Blake might have been resisting arrest, in apparent contradiction to her above claim that he was merely “going to his car”) “Everybody should be afforded due process – I agree with that completely. But here’s the thing, in America we know these cases keep happening. And we have had too many Black men in America who have been the subject of this kind of conduct and it’s got to stop.”

In other words, according to both candidates, Blake’s shooting not only looked like an excessive use of force. It looked like a racist use of force.

And maybe that’s why Mr. Biden and Harris didn’t apologize for attacking Sheskey’s supposed recklessness with his gun. Maybe they were awaiting the results of a Justice Department probe focused on whether Sheskey’s actions added up to a civil rights crime under federal law.

Yet the investigation, launched by the Trump Justice Department later in August, 2020, reached its conclusion this past Friday. The verdict (of the Biden Justice Department)?

“[A] team of experienced federal prosecutors determined that insufficient evidence exists to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the KPD [Kenosha Police Department] officer willfully violated the federal criminal civil rights statutes. Accordingly, the review of this incident has been closed without a federal prosecution.”

So what we have is a determination by a Wisconsin Democratic prosecutor that there was no reason even to indict Sheskey for over-aggressiveness in shooting Blake, and a determination by the Biden Justice Department that there was no reason to indict him for racist behavior. Now what we need is some contrition from the President and the Vice President (not to mention LeBron.) Otherwise, we’ll have another reason, on top of, for example, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal and the Border Crisis, to believe that the concept of accountability is foreign to the Biden-Harris administration.

Im-Politic: Crime Derangement Syndrome

Tags

African Americans, Chicago, cities, crime, District of Columbia, gaslighting, gentrification, homicide, Im-Politic, inner cities, law enforcement, Mainstream Media, minorities, murder, policing, race relations, racism, Washington Post, white fragility, whites

If you still doubt that Mainstream Media coverage of the last year-plus’ national crime wave – which inevitably affects how Americans overall think about this issue – has gone completely off the wall, check out last weekend’s long Washington Post piece about the contrasting views of Black and White residents of the District of Columbia about homicides in city neighborhoods where they make up majorities.

I should actually say “supposedly contrasting views,” because there’s no reason to think that the opinions reported amount to a representative sampling of any segment of the public. In fact, it’s far more likely that these selected views reveal how this premier newspaper’s journalists (including of course editors) regard these matters.

Specifically, the article makes painfully clear how they and the rest of a disturbingly woke national media are now regularly turning cognitive somersaults in order to pin the blame for urban violence – which takes place overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods and claims overwhelmingly minority victims – on anyone except the criminals who overwhelmingly come from these same precincts. Heading this article’s list of the truly guilty are White Americans, who allegedly only care about such violent crime when it starts threatening them and their neighborhoods.

As written by authors Rachel Chason and Emily Davies (and approved by every editor with authority over the article):

“From the majority-Black neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River that have long been afflicted by gun violence to wealthier, Whiter parts of the city that have only sporadically experienced it, there is a sense that the issue is receiving more attention now in part because the violence is touching gentrified areas like 14th Street NW.”

Especially unhinged (or “less hinged”?) – the White residents so charged by the Post live in the District, which is one of the most Democratic Party-leaning areas of the country.

But don’t think for a minute that the Post believes this alleged hypocrisy is confined to the District. After all, this is a publication that since the May, 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis, Minnesota policeman has launched a big new news beat preachily called “Race and Reckoning.” And it’s no accident that this truly national newspaper, read assiduously throughout the D.C.-based federal government and broader national policy and political establishments – ran the article on the front page of its print edition.

The glaring irony should be lost on no one: There was actually no shortage of Americans who have been calling attention to the violence-prone nature of these minority neighborhoods and its causes for years before the Floyd murder, and who have continued to flag the issue since then. And whether they’ve been indisputably liberal or progressive (as was the case with former President Barack Obama) or, more recently, conservative, (see especially any number of episodes of the Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham talk shows on Fox News, or the years of studies by Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather MacDonald, or some of former President Donald Trump’s remarks), the reaction has been typically the same. They’re pilloried as fear-mongering racists. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

Another favorite response to decrying the so-called obsession with Black-on-Black crime: what can only be called gaslighting. My favorite example of such “Nothing to see here” claims came here in 2016, when an apologist for inner city crime (writing, not so coincidentally, in the Washington Post) went so far as to suggest that the idea of “war-torn” South Side Chicago was nothing but a myth.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that last week’s Post piece took gaslighting a big step further that was not only downright looney, but obviously racist – except to the hopelessly woke. It came in a description of a digital exchanges among residents of D.C.’s upper 14^th Street neighborhood (which has been rapidly gentrifying in recent years and recently was the scene of a shooting that stunned its newest, more affluent residents in particular) and the nearby Shaw district (in which gentrification has been slower). It’s worth quoting the Post‘s account of it in full:

In the conversation “about violence, rowdy behavior near bars, noise from ATVs, trash and illegal parking, [White 14th Street-er Jeffrey Willis wrote] ‘We have lost control of the streets here & apparently elsewhere’….

“Shortly after came a terse reply from a woman who said she grew up in Shaw and was angered by what she saw as a desire to over-police Black communities and a refusal to understand the Black culture long at the heart of Shaw.”

In other words, “violence, rowdy behavior near bars, noise from ATVs, trash and illegal parking” should now be seen as part of “Black culture.” In addition, it should be preserved against an onslaught of White Fragility. Now it’s always possible that this woman’s frustrations about inherently difficult changes in residential patterns momentarily overcame her common sense, and that she didn’t really mean to praise such behavior. It happens to everyone. But it’s still remarkable, and in my view revealing, that her claim went utterly without comment in the Post.

Although its origins are fuzzy, I’ve always thought that one of the most compelling ideas ever advanced is the contention that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Last week’s Post piece, and the overall direction of American thinking on race, racism, and crime, makes clear that the only thing necessary for the triumph of arrant, dangerous, and indeed racist claptrap to triumph is for sensible folks to respond just as passively.      

Those Stubborn Facts: Race, Class, and Crime in NYC

Tags

"Defund the Police", African Americans, Bronx, class, crime, Democrats, Eric Adams, Latinos, law enforcement, Manhattan, New York City, police, police brutality, policing, progressives, race, subways, Those Stubborn Facts, whites

Share of college-graduate New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 62%

Share of non-college-grad New Yorkers wanting more policy on the subway: 80%

Share of New Yorkers earning $50K-plus per year wanting more police on the subway: 66%

Share of New Yorkers earning less than $50K per year wanting more police on the subway: 75%

Share of white New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 62%

Share of Latino New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 69%

Share of African American New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 77%

Share of Manhattan-ites saying they feel safe from crime riding the subway: 65%

Share of Bronx residents saying they feel safe from crime riding the subway: 43%

(Sources: “Progressives in Denial About Crime Are Catering to Elites and Losing Elections,” by Zaid Jilani, Newsweek, July 14, 2021, Progressives in Denial About Crime Are Catering to Elites and Losing Elections | Opinion (newsweek.com) )

Following Up: Gun Sense Still Lacking in the Crime/Violence/African Americans Debate

Tags

African Americans, Arionne Nettles, Barack Obama, Chicago, crime, Following Up, gun violence, guns, homicides, law enforcement, police reform, policing, poverty, racism, The New York Times

Everyone (like me) worried about the metastasizing influence of race-panderers can give thanks that so many are so completely, and indeed stupefyingly, incompetent. Otherwise, merchants of division like Northwestern University journalism faculty member Arionne Nettles and her enablers at The New York Times might be overwhelming favorites to tear the country apart for good. All the same, the more they push claims (I’m getting fed up with the pseudo-sophisticated term “narrative”) that are not only flagrantly phony but transparently contradictory, the more they obscure genuine and important failures and inequities that need fixing.

Nettles and The Times editors who considered her piece on African American victims of “gun violence” worthy of publication in this form took only a paragraph and a half to blow up their own case that big cities across the United States have seen a recent “rise in gun violence – perpetrated both by civilians and police officers” that’s taken an especially heavy toll on black children and teenagers.

They’re of course right about these tragedies and their scale. But the obvious insinuation that “civilians and police officers” share even remotely comparable blame is demolished by the observation that

“In one especially alarming spree last summer, Chicago police officers shot five people in just two months. And shootings and murders in the city were up more than 50 percent overall in 2020 compared with 2019; 875 people died from gun violence – a record high. A majority of the city’s victims (78 percent) were Black.”

Let’s assume that every one of the five Chicago police shootings mentioned here was totally unjustified. Let’s also state categorically that unjustified shootings by police are way more disturbing than other types of shootings because law enforcement must be held to a much higher standard. Are Nettles and The Times still seriously contending that the two categories of violence are on anything like a par, even as threats to African American lives?

More important, these and similar passages – along with Nettles’ interviews with African American mothers who have lost children to such violence – add powerfully to the evidence that, as I’ve argued before, the overwhelming problem here isn’t “gun violence” at all. Instead, it’s a culture of violence and broader irresponsibility that’s gained a strong foothold in too many Black neighborhoods, and whose importance keeps being ignored by supposed champions of American minorities.

A handful of data points from recent (2018) national (FBI) law enforcement statistics clinch this case. First, of the 328.24 million total U.S. population estimated by the Census Bureau that year, 76.3 percent were white and 13.4 percent African American. That’s a ratio of nearly six-to-one. Yet that year, reported Black homicide offenders in one-on-one incidents actually slightly outnumbered their white counterparts in absolute terms (3,177 to 3,011).

Almost as stunning: Of the 2,925 Black homicide victims that year, nearly 89 percent were killed by other Blacks. Nearly 81 percent of the 3,315 white homicide victims in 2018 were killed by whites, so it’s clear that American killers principally go after members of their own race. But relatively speaking these figures – combined with Nettles’ accurate observation that Blacks are much likelier to die in firearms incidents than Whites – reveal not a gun violence crisis afflicting so many African American communities. They reveal an African American violence problem.

No one can reasonably doubt that racism’s legacy and the resulting lack of economic opportunity and poverty play a big underlying role. As I (and many others) have written, the racial wealth gap alone is yawning, owes much to discrimination, and generates affects that have lasted generations. It should be just as hard reasonably to doubt, however, that something other than poverty is responsible.

Look at Chicago. In 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, its Black poverty rate was 26.3 percent – that’s much higher than the overall poverty rate for the city (16.4 percent), or the national African American poverty rate (18.8 percent). So even though there seems to be a Chicago-specific problem on top of a poverty problem, even in Chicago nearly three fourths of the Black population lives above the poverty line. That hardly means affluence, but it’s hardly destitution, either.

Moreover, the Chicago Black poverty rate is down considerably from 2010’s 33.6 percent (although the city’s overall poverty rate fell faster during this period). Yet the city’s numbers of homicides and its homicide rate have roughly doubled during the subsequent nine data years, and in Chicago, the vast majority of the killers (as with the victims) are African American.

As suggested above, moreover, Nettles’ ham-handed treatment of the “gun violence” and homicide issue is all the more inexcusable because the author’s interview subjects do a decent job of reinforcing the case that there does exist a serious race-based policing problem in this country. Not that the African American women with which the author spoke are entirely free of denialism about what’s plaguing their neighborhoods. There’s Shanice Steenholdt, who seems to believe that Australia-like gun control laws would turn her city of Houston into a replica of the small Australian town in which she lived for a time where she “didn’t feel like [she] had to worry about gun violence.” There’s Chicago’s Diane Lasiker, w appears to think that the big problem in her city is that it seems “to want to keep the Police Department separate from the community.” Her fellow Chicagoan Chez Smith and Flint, Michigan’s Marcia McQueen put much stock in “offering conflict resolution techniques” to their communities’ youth.

But the story told by Atlanta’s Cora Miller of her husband’s arrest (in Minnesota) reinforces the case that it’s much too common for completely innocent African Americans to be mistreated by police. As I’d written last August, I’ve heard first-hand accounts of such episodes from Black friends who have experienced it first hand – on top of South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott’s experiences with Capitol police. If these individuals – who are all highly successful by any reasonable definition – can be harassed for no good reason, imagine how often everyday folks just trying to get by face these indignities and indeed dangers.

So let’s by all means get policing up to snuff. Let’s by all means identify the most effective ways in which government and business can help foster opportunity in needy Black (and other) communities. But let’s also never forget a voice who has passionately argued that

“no matter how much money we invest in our communities, or how many 10-point plans we propose or how many government programs we launch — none of it will make a difference, at least not enough of a difference, if we don’t seize more responsibility in our own lives.”

In case you’re wondering, his name is Barack Obama.

Im-Politic: Biden’s Big George Floyd Fail

Tags

African Americans, Biden, Chauvin trial, criminal justice, Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, Im-Politic, Jimmy Carter, law enforcement, police, police brutality, Soviet Union, systemic racism

Back in 1978, President Jimmy Carter felt he had a big problem. He wanted to use an upcoming speech to send a major message to Moscow about the future of his policy toward the Soviet Union, but his main foreign policy advisers were split. His White House national security chief urged him to take a tougher line across-the-board, but his Secretary of State backed a more nuanced approach.

According to some of his aides, he finally dealt with the problem by taking the preparatory memos each of them wrote, stapling them together, and using the resulting contradictory document as the basis of the address. Not surprisngly, Carter simply succeeded in sowing confusion throughout the nation and around the world, and reinforcing a growing perception that he was a fatally indecisive leader.

What really happened is still up in the air. (See here for the background and a good description of some of the major conflicting accounts). But I dredge up this episode because President Biden’s remarks yesterday about the verdict in the “George Floyd trial” struck me as equally incoherent and troubling – at best.

It seems clear that the President was trying to walk an unquestionably fine line. On the one hand, he was trying to make the case that although former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering Floyd during an arrest, serious racial problems still plagued American law enforcement. On the other hand, he obviously recognized the dangers of describing all or even most or even lots of policemen and women as disgraceful racists in whom the nation – and especially minority Americans – should place no trust.

But it should also be clear that Mr. Biden’s apparent balancing act merited a solid “F.” He did state that “most men and women who wear the badge serve their communities honorably” and even that exceptions were “few.”

Those contentions, though, were exceptions themselves, for much more of the text consisted of a description of American law enforcement that not only included the systemic racism charge, but that accused the system literally of waging war on minorities.

What else can be concluded from his contentions about “the fear so many people of color live with every day when they go to sleep at night and pray for the safety of themselves and their loved ones”?

And about the need to “ensure that Black and brown people or anyone…don’t fear the interactions with law enforcement, that they don’t have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. They don’t have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home”?

And about the imperative of “acknowledging and confronting, head on, systemic racism and the racial disparities that exist in policing and in our criminal justice system more broadly”?

Let’s leave aside for now the strong evidence that African Americans “want police to spend same amount of or more time in their area” – a share that stood at 81 percent according to a Gallup survey last summer. (For some other polling data powerfully challenging the systemic racism narrative, see this post.)

The most charitable conclusion possible is that Mr. Biden believes that this criminal justice system is systemically (meaning “deliberately?” “pervasively”? Both?) racist even though most of its foot soldiers – who interact with minorities the most often by far – somehow aren’t. That’s not exactly a resounding testament to his reasoning or analytical skills, or to his common sense.

Cynics could understandably decide that the President chose to pay a bit of lip service to cops before aggressively embracing the systemic racism school of thought in hopes of making everyone from politically moderate voters to his own party’s far Left happy.

And what’s to be made of a President who demonstrates absolutely no awareness that the views he’s expressing have little grounding in reality?

Near the end of his talk, Mr. Biden rightly warned about the threat posed by “those who will seek to exploit the raw emotions of the moment — agitators and extremists who have no interest in social justice; who seek to carry out violence, destroy property, to fan the flames of hate and division; who will do everything in their power to stop this country’s march toward racial justice. We can’t let them succeed.”

No sane person could accuse the President of supporting or fostering most of these outrages. But when it comes to “fanning the flames of hate and division,” his George Floyd remarks came uncomfortably close.

Im-Politic: More Evidence That Trump Should Really be Trump

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2018 elections, African Americans, Democrats, election 2020, establishment Republicans, Im-Politic, Immigration, impeachment, Jacob Blake, Joe Biden, Joseph Simonson, Kamala Harris, Kenosha, law enforcement, Mickey Kaus, Obamacare, Open Borders, police shooting, race relations, regulations, Republican National Committee, Republicans, riots, RNC, Rust Belt, tax cuts, trade policy, Trump, Washington Examiner, white working class

Since the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency, I and many of those who backed his election have been frustrated by his frequent support for and even prioritizing of issues and positions championed by orthodox Republicans and conseratives. After all, there was little reason to believe that he won the Republican nomination, much less the White House, because he was focused laser-like on cutting taxes and regulations or eliminating Obamacare. If that’s what either Republican or overall voters wanted, then you’d think that an orthodox Republican would have wound up running against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton – and triumphing.

One reason I came up with to explain the early burst of conservative traditionalism from Mr Trump (highlighted by a failed effort at healthcare reform and a successful full court press waged to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017) was his need to make sure that the establishment wing of his party stayed with him if he faced an impeachment.

His gambit worked, but even though the impeachment threat is gone, I still hear the President talking up the tax cuts and regulation thing way too much for my tastes. So it’s more than a little interesting to have just learned that, at least according to a report last week in the Washington [D.C.] Examiner, I haven’t been alone. (Or, more accurately, I and a handful of nationalist-populist analysts like Mickey Kaus haven’t been alone.) In this article, Examiner correspondent Joseph Simonson contends that some folks connected with the Republican National Committee (RNC) came to the same conclusion in the late summer and early fall of 2018. And just as important – their analysis came just before the GOP suffered major setbacks in that year’s Congressional elections after doubling down on conventional Republicanism.

Among the highlights of the report (whose existence the RNC denies):

>”Voter data from areas such as Kenosha County, Wisconsin, [we’ll return to this astonishing coincidence below] and other exurban communities, the individual said, showed a troubling trend. Although voters there very narrowly backed Trump in 2016, President Barack Obama’s margins were in the double digits in 2008 and 2012.”

>”Unlike members of Trump’s base, who can be trusted to vote for just about any Republican candidate, these voters feel no strong affinity toward the GOP. Moreover, the interests of those who live in communities such as Kenosha differ greatly from those who live in the Philadelphia suburbs in Pennsylvania.

“These Rust Belt voters favor stronger social safety nets and hawkishness on trade, rather than typical GOP orthodoxies such as lower tax rates and an easier regulatory environment for businesses. That is not to say these voters oppose those things, but the rhetorical obsession from GOP donors and members of the party do little to excite one-time Trump voters.”

>“Back in 2018 the general response to the report from others who worked at the RNC, said one individual, was, ‘well, we have socialism’ as an attack against Democrats and boasts about their new digital voter turnout apparatus.’”

>”Steve Bannon, the former aide to the president who was indicted last week on fraud charges, had viewed the same report a year ago and concluded that the upcoming election against Biden looked like a “blow out” in the former vice president’s favor.”

But let’s get back to the Kenosha point – which of course is unusually interesting and important given the race- and police-shooting-related violence that just convulsed the small city recently. It’s also interesting and important because the alleged report’s treatment of racial issues indicates that the authors weren’t completely prescient.

Specifically, they faulted the RNC for wasting time and resources on a  “coalition building” effort aimed at “enlisting the support from black, Hispanic, and Asian voters who make only a marginal difference in the Midwest and [that] can prove potentially damaging if more likely Republicans are neglected.”

Explained one person quoted by Simonson (and possibly one of the authors): “Lots of these people at the RNC are in a state of denial. The base of the GOP are white people, and that gives the party an advantage in national elections. You could not have a voter operation in California whatsoever, and it wouldn’t make any difference, but the RNC does because they don’t want to admit those states are lost forever.” .

Yet even before the eruption of violence in Kenosha (and too many other communities), this analysis overlooked a crucial reality: There was never any reason to assume that, in the Midwest Rust Belt states so crucial to the President’s 2016 victory and yet won so narrowly, that significant portions of the African American vote couldn’t be attracted without alienating the white working class. For both blacks and whites alike in industrial communities have been harmed by the same pre-Trump trade policies strongly supported by his chief November rival Joe Biden and many other Democrats. (For one example of the impact on African Americans, see this post.) Moreover, among the biggest losers from the Open Borders-friendly immigration policies now openly championed, instead of stealthily fostered, by the Democratic Party mainstream, have been African Americans.

It’s not that the President and Republicans had to convince massive numbers of African Americans with these arguments. A few dozen thousand could be more than enough to make a big difference this fall. And there’s some polling data indicating that the strategy was working even before the opening of a Republican convention that featured numerous African American speakers.

Now of course we’re post-the Jacob Blake shooting by Kenosha police and the subsequent rioting and vigilantism. We’re also post-the Biden choice of woman-of-color Kamala Harris as his running mate. Will those developments sink the Trump outreach effort to African Americans and validate the 2018 memo’s arguments?

Certainly the Harris choice doesn’t look like a game-changer. The California Senator, you’ll remember, was decisively rejected by African American voters during the Democratic primaries. I’m less certain about the Kenosha Effect. On the one hand, Mr. Trump has expressed precious little empathy for black victims of police shootings. On the other hand, he has villified the rioting and looting that are destroying the businesses – including African-American-owned – relied on by many urban black neighborhoods in cities that have long stagnated, at best, under Democratic Mayors. And this poll I highlighted a few weeks ago presents significant evidence that most African Americans have no interest in fewer police on the streets where they live.

It’s not hard to imagine a Trump campaign message developing over the next two months that strikes a much better balance. And an early test case looks set for tomorrow with the President’s planned visit to Kenosha. Somewhat harder to imagine is Mr. Trump significantly downplaying issues like tax and regulatory cuts, and ending Obamacare. As for his priorities if he wins reelection? At this point, the evidence is so mixed that I feel clueless. So stay tuned!